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Iron Man 3 Nearly Had A Sex Tape Subplot

Since its release a week or so back, Iron Man 3has taken all of the money, and with good reason. The triumphant review on this very site demonstrated why that should be the case, and now that the dust is starting to settle and we’re basking in the post-coital bliss of another Marvel movie, puffing our cigarettes or drinking our barley wine, everyone loosens their belts a little.

It’s like if you’ve ever got a group of old soldiers together, and ply them with drink, it isn’t long before the old war stories start to flow. Well, it turns out that Empire magazine did this very thing with director Shane Black and his co-writer Drew Pearce, in the form of a podcast. If you’re going to listen to the 45 minute audio clip then be warned – there are a hell of a lot of spoilers in there. A hell of a lot. I mean, whoa. Too many.

In between the spoilers (too many spoilers, whoa) they also reveal some interesting tidbits about earlier drafts of the movie. Other villains aside from the Mandarin slated to be included were Madden, Kreeger, and Edwin Cord, for instance. But most interestingly, the first draft featured a very different slant on the relationship between Aldrich Killian and Pepper Potts, one that is hinted at when they first meet – they were to have a sexual encounter, which Killian secretly records to use as a psychological weapon by broadcasting it in Home Depot.

It’s not so much an act of cartoon villainy as shockingly sadistic, and would show Killian to be more psychopathically sleazy than just completely amoral. It’d also probably have pushed the movie into R-rated territory, which is probably why the storyline was canned.

Much has been made of the great job that Shane Black and Drew Pearce did re-writing the language of superhero films, and deconstructing them in an interesting way, but the existence of the early sex tape subplot shows just how revolutionary Iron Man 3could have been, possibly to its detriment.